That’s right, Grasshopper. A good story doesn’t mean what it *means.* Nothing illustrates the difference between writing fiction and writing nonfiction more clearly than this simple, but hard to verbalize, fact of life.

Paradox? Yes, but when you think about it, what is fiction but paradox upon paradox upon paradox? Consider:

• Readers must know enough to get what’s happening, yet if you interpret, in narrative, what they’ve just seen in action, the scene falls flat.

• Readers demand the unpredictable, the surprising, yet if you strain their credulity only slightly, you’ve lost them.

• Readers want dialogue that’s meaningful, but they shy away from “on-the-money” speeches: “I’m in love with you, Jennifer. But I’m no different from most men. We cluster around the security of marriage and home. Might as well face it, sweetheart, I’m never going to leave Barbara.” Ugh.

Indeed, the entire enterprise of fiction is based on a single stupendous paradox: that you must convince readers to believe, willingly, things they know can’t possibly be true. (P.S. Done well, it works.)

Nonfiction, by contrast – journalism, for example – wants there to be no confusion about what actually happened. The meaning of what happened, if it’s part of the report at all, is a summing-up of its significance, determined logically by assessing the event:

The earthquake, which happened in the prime evening hours, occurred directly under the National Soccer Stadium, a potential disaster for thousands of concertgoers with tickets to hear pop star Juan Carlos. By a fluke of fate, however, Juan Carlos had cancelled his appearance due to anaemic advance orders, and since no event was scheduled, the lucky fans were home in their beds.

Clear what happened? Like a bell. And yes, fiction requires basic clarity too (what happened under the stadium? what were the immediate physical and medical consequences? etc.) but fiction’s ultimate aim is not to document the earthquake so much as to reveal the depth and power of its emotional consequences – usually visited on a few key characters:

Juan Carlos had canceled his scheduled stadium concert for that night. The advance orders had been miserable. He was finished, he told himself, washed up. Then he heard the news on the radio in his kitchen and fell to his knees. Something was stirring in the room around him, moving and shifting slowly. He had no idea what it might be, but it was bigger than good or evil, bigger certainly than his paltry career. “Thank you, thank you, thank you…” he muttered into his clasped fists, over and over again, not sure to whom or what…

And so, maybe we have the beginning of a story or novel in which an over-the-hill South American pop star finds his career path obliterated, his relationship to the Universe changed forever, by a single miraculous act of salvation. Where might this go? A lot of places. And we’re off…

An unremarkable 30-ish married couple is rocked by the news that their seven-year-old son has a malignant tumor. High medical drama, for sure, and as the story moves forward, it might appear to be about the boy’s shifting diagnosis, his treatment, his odds for survival. But read carefully: this is fiction. If it is a good story, it will move its focus inexorably toward the parents and how the emotional consequnces play out in them. It will drill deep into character, where, separately and together, the couple will be severely tested. As their child’s disease takes its course, the arc of the story will form, complication by complication, pointing toward an ultimate crisis in the shared life of this family. What began as a story about a boy – and still hangs on the progress of his condition – will turn out to be more about an ordeal of two parents, blindsided by life, and how they deal with the twisted cruelty of their shared destiny.

One more time, then: Good fiction is not about what it is about. It’s about what lies within, beneath, hidden, unspoken, but super-powerful, like any cataclysm that occurs in the dark. And to go one more step farther, it is ultimately about what all this upheaval means for characters we care about.

ƒ

I’ve heard it said that in life people don’t really change, and that herein lies the fundamental dishonesty of fiction –the “lie” that certain experiences can change a person forever.

So fiction is a sham? A construct? A lie? Here’s my answer:

First, yes we are most certainly sham artists. We construct and we lie. And when we do it well, we’re proud of it. Damned proud. We not only lie, we spend untold hours, days, years struggling to make the lie so good that reader can’t tell the difference between our illusion and reality itself.

Second, if our characters don’t undergo a significant sea change by story’s end, we will have failed–and probably lost most of our readers along the way. If you’re a fiction writer, you don’t care whether or not people change in real life; but you know from hard experience that a main character must actively change.

Something powerful (invented by you) must drive that character through a long arc of change that ends in a place very different from that where he or she started. Anything less and what’s the point? Why take a reader on a journey to nowhere?

Third, and most important, the whole bru-ha-ha is bogus, based on to conflicting ways of using the verb “to change.” Yes, it’s correct that in life, people don’t “change.” They do however, modify their natures under pressure–sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Alcoholics stop drinking. They don’t lose their addiction. They “change” by modifying one huge piece of behavior.

The next time you hear “But people don’t REALLY change, do they?” my advice is, don’t argue, cede the point––then add, “And so what? The point is irrelevant to the requirements of building a good story. It’s not our job to create real people in a real word. It is our job to create story people in story people in a made-up world. And to do it, we must make our made-up worlds seem as real as the “real” world–and yet the only way to do this is to be (yes) bogus: we are wholeheartedly constructing a sham, a construct, a lie.

Paradoxical? You better believe it!

In a novel, in a memoir, a good chapter is structured like a complete narrative: it begins with a situation, complications are introduced and build to a head, and…

And what?

Here’s where a chapter differs from a story. A chapter “ends” without a major resolution. The novel’s narrative arc continues on.

You might even say that lack of resolution is the hallmark of an effective chapter. The Cliff Hanger, for instance, is an extreme (and extremely successful) example of NOT achieving resolution. Where resolution would normally occur, a major new complication is introduced just as the chapter is winding down, compelling the reader to read on.

But since resolution isn’t the goal, there’s a common misconception that you are free to end a chapter anywhere you choose to cut it off–in other words, abandon structure altogether. But you can’t. Tripartite structure is too deeply ingrained in us: we need at least the illusion of dramatic closure to lend the chapter a closing beat.

What’s a closing beat? Almost anything–a thought, an event, a perception, a discovery. It can be as simple as your main character’s musings about tomorrow, as he goes to sleep, exhausted by the day’s events. Or it can a new and provocative piece of information, signaling to the reader that somewhere, somehow, a confrontation is looming.

Example: A husband reflects suddenly that his wife has lied to him about a trivial appointment that never actually existed. If we know the wife has been having an affair with his best friend, you can bet we’ll jump right into the next chapter: we sense something is going to happen, and we’re compelled to witness–and it’s mission accomplished: you’ve kept the reader onboard.

Overlook the need for a closing beat of some kind and you invite your readers to wonder: “That’s odd…why did it stop just there?” When a reader is thinking those thoughts, the story spell his been broken, and you’re losing valuable momentum.

Flow. It’s not a plumbing emergency. It’s not religious ecstasy. It’s not satori–although it might feel like it. So what is it?

We all know what it’s like to hit the sweet spot in writing your novel. Resistance falls away. Thoughts find words without struggle. Five minutes, 20 minutes, two hours — they all feel the same.

I’m talking about what psychologist and author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “the state of flow.” The need to find self-motivation drops away: activity becomes its own motivation. All those strategies we use to flog, coax, or trick ourselves to the desk, all the paralizing fears of “is it be good enough” dissolve. We’re just…doing it. No big deal. Whatever the task, we’re one with it.

Csikszentmihalyi popularized the concept in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, but for centuries or more, creative artists, religious adepts, “thinkers,” have known that’s the place they must get to if they want their work to live and breathe.

Flow is just a notch away from spontaneous play. It’s where the kids have been when they come home late for dinner saying, “we lost track of the time.” But in most adults, rational processes gain prominence, largely shutting the door to the unconscious––our most powerful source of creative ideas. In flow, the door flies open again.

There’s also evidence that the state of flow represents you at your very best: if it’s a writing session, that writing will be more successfully realized than work done in the normal state of creative agony.

So how do you get yourself into a state of flow? And once you’re there, how do you make it last? Here are some tips:< !––nextpage––>

1. Be Fresh
In my experience, fatigue trumps flow. When you’re tired, getting your 500 words done is like herding salamanders. Get a good night’s sleep, have a nap, take a walk around the block. Then sit down, with a clear head. The result: more natural energy > flow > better ideas, more “creative” connections.

2. Clarify a Goal
What do you want to achieve in this writing session? Take some time to define a goal––just one is sufficient for a single writing session. Be realistic: make sure it’s doable. It shouldn’t be too too much of a stretch, nor should it be too easy. Articulate your goal. Make it specific. Not: “to have an awesome writing session,” but: “to rewrite the breakup scene with more passion from Ellen.” Remember that once something is named, you begin to own it, and when you own it, you’re only a step or two way from flow.

3. Give yourself ample time.
Clock watching is a dead hand on your effort. Make sure you know, going in, that you’ve cleared ample time, and that the time is yours––all yours.

4. Quiet, Please.
You know what kinds of noises break your concentration. Set conditions so those noises won’t be there–or you won’t be where they are. But let’s be practical: there are those days when it’s impossible to avoid: it’s either “do it anyway” or you fold. For those days, see “Use Tools,” below.

5. Come Prepared
Before getting underway review characters, possible scenes, the details of place, time, and situation that create the world of your story. Some writers like to do their prep the night before. Others read over what they’ve done so far, then jump in. However you do it, getting a firmer handle on your story makes you more confident, and confidence easily turns into playfulness, that state where effort is “effortless,” child’s play. That’s flow.

6. Hide 
That is, find your hiding place and disappear. Choose wisely. Could Joyce really write at the kitchen table, with family stuff going on all around him? I wonder. I certainly couldn’t. But if that’s you, go for it. If you need complete privacy, but you can’t arrange it, hide in plain sight. Find a workplace that fends off any distraction of the “look who’s here” variety. When you’re anonymous, it disengages your ego–and trust me, there’s no more perfect a state for a writer.

7. Use Tools
By tools, I mean not so much the hardware or software you write with, but “tools” for creating the right mind-space for you to work in. One thing that stops my flow cold is nearby conversation. I stop the chatter by using noise-canceling earbuds, plugged into my favorite “wallpaper” music––usually Liquid Mind. It’s non-involving, mood setting, and reduces environmental distraction to a non-factor. And, if you use the non-pay version of Pandora, it’s free.